I'm sure John McCain is totally lost on the irony of criticizing Obama for being presumptuous, while the Arizona senator is sending a delegation to Georgia to help sort out the crises there, as well as talking with the Georgian president every day.

Does John McCain realize that we only have one president (such as he is) at a time? I'm waiting for someone in the Bush administration to get pissed off and tell McCain to back the hell off. He's messing around with a war here, trying to score political points off people dying.

If there's one thing this episode points out, is that John McCain really likes conflict. He's hotheaded and trigger happy, just as several Republicans have worried openly about in the past. I fear for the world if he gets his hands on the button.

John McCain talks a good game one renewable energy, but as Tom Friedman points out, he sure doesn't vote that way. He has skipped every vote on the subject. This would make a great Obama ad.

So John McCain doesn't think Barack Obama should visit his elderly grandmother? McCain is fast becoming that angry old man who yells at the kids to get off his lawn.

But worse, why hasn't McCain said anything negative about his buddy President Bush, who has set the record for vacation days by a sitting president? Obama can't take a week off to see his grandmother, but Bush can take months of vacations, overlooking things like that daily briefing about terrorists planning to attack America.

Here's an ad hitting McCain on his "maverick" image. It's pretty good:

"Now Obama is starting to play by Karl Rove rules. Hit your opponent at their strength. McCain's strength has been his long-since-vanished reputation as a maverick. And it's about time. A lot of Dems are upset that Obama has let the attacks gone unanswered for so long:

On McCain, the Obama people are missing a golden opportunity with this tire pressure thing. Hit McCain back in the teeth. "Of course he wouldn't understand, Millionaire McCain hasn't driven in years. He's been in a chaffeur-driven limo, or on his wife's plane. Jet-setting among his 10 house. He wouldn't know a tire gauge from a Web page.

"Hit the man in the teeth. piss him off. Start calling him Daddy Warbucks. Seriously, pull out the stops. It puts all of the critiques together. He's old. He's a war monger. And he's rich. Why the hell didn't they put out an ad saying McCain was gonna make million off the sale of Budweiser? Jesus, this is getting ridiculous. Hit McCain in his wheelhouse and piss him off. All it will take is McCain losing his cool once and he'll drop like a stone. The ads write themselves."

McCain Bundler Collects From Unlikely Donors:

Some of the most prolific givers in Sargeant's network live in modest homes in Southern California's Inland Empire. Most had never given a political contribution before being contacted by Sargeant or his associates. Most said they have never voiced much interest in politics. And in several instances, they had never registered to vote. And yet, records show, some families have ponied up as much as $18,400 for various candidates between December and March....

Nader, 39, and Sahar Alhawash, 28, of Colton, Calif, who at one point ran the Avon Village Liquor store, donated a total of $18,400 to Giuliani, Clinton and McCain between December and March. About 80 people in the country made such large contributions to all three, and most were wealthy business executives, such as Donald Trump. The Alhawashes declined to comment about the donations. Abdullah Abdullah, a supervisor at several Taco Bell restaurants in the Riverside area, and his wife have donated $9,200 to McCain.

Reached at work, Abdullah said he knows little about the campaign. "I have no idea. I'll be honest with you," he said. "I'm involved in the restaurant business. My brother Faisel recommended John McCain. Whenever he makes a recommendation, we do it."

Faisal Abdullah, 49, said he helped organize all of the contributions from members of his family. When he was asked who solicited the contributions from him, he said: "Why does it matter who? I'm telling you we made the contribution. We funneled it through the channel in Florida because that's the contact we had. I was responsible for collecting it."

The bundler, Harry Sargeant III, has Defense contracts to supply fuel to the military in Iraq, worth about a billion dollars, even though his bid wasn't the lowest. He got the contract because he was the only bidder who had an agreement with the country of Jordan to ship the fuel across its territory.

And these big donors of modest means? They are mostly Arabs. Why would people who aren't even registered to vote give max donations to a candidate? Either these are straw donors, or someone is putting the squeeze on them, possibly through some kind of underground lending network, which are common in the Middle East.

Sorry, but I don't believe Barack Obama is seriously considering Evan Bayh for VP. Bayh has one huge strike against him: Indiana has a Republican governor, who would pick his replacement should Obama win. Obama is putting a lot of effort into making sure he has a strong congressional majority, and he's not going to throw away a badly needed vote in the Senate.

I suspect this has more to do with placating Hillary backers who haven't come around to full support Obama yet. If Obama does pick Bayh, that tells me there is a whole lot of internal warfare going on in the party that we don't know about. Having Bayh on the ticket means that a bunch of Hillary people will be getting jobs in the new administration. It speaks to the core corruption in both parties that the VP selection comes down to securing jobs for cronies, even at the cost of pushing through the party's platform.

Well, maybe. He did offer her up to be a contestant for the Miss Buffalo Chip contest at the big Sturgis biker rally today. For those of us who've been outside of Washington sometime these past 26 years would probably know that entering a biker beauty pageant in Sturgis isn't exactly the kind of wholesome activity you would want your wife or daughter anywhere around. It's like a mix of the Wild One and Girls Gone Wild:

It's funny that McCain would jump into something like this. But what it really shows is the glaring double standard for how the candidates are treated. If Obama had come within a hundred miles of Sturgis (much less offered his wife up for a raunchy, nude contest), you would have heard every right-wing blowhard talking about what a degenerate liberal he is.

But do you think you'll hear a peep out of those holier-than-thou bloviators about McCain wanting to enter his wife in a wet t-shirt contest? (crickets)

The problem with solar power is that the sun doesn't shine all the time. I once thought that you could store excess energy by performing electrolysis, thus producing hydrogen and oxygen, and then recombine them later to produce power at night. But electrolysis is not very efficient.

Turns out some guys a lot smarter than me at MIT came up with a better way to do this:

Inspired by the photosynthesis performed by plants, Nocera and Matthew Kanan, a postdoctoral fellow in Nocera's lab, have developed an unprecedented process that will allow the sun's energy to be used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases. Later, the oxygen and hydrogen may be recombined inside a fuel cell, creating carbon-free electricity to power your house or your electric car, day or night.

The key component in Nocera and Kanan's new process is a new catalyst that produces oxygen gas from water; another catalyst produces valuable hydrogen gas. The new catalyst consists of cobalt metal, phosphate and an electrode, placed in water. When electricity -- whether from a photovoltaic cell, a wind turbine or any other source -- runs through the electrode, the cobalt and phosphate form a thin film on the electrode, and oxygen gas is produced.

Combined with another catalyst, such as platinum, that can produce hydrogen gas from water, the system can duplicate the water splitting reaction that occurs during photosynthesis.The new catalyst works at room temperature, in neutral pH water, and it's easy to set up, Nocera said. "That's why I know this is going to work. It's so easy to implement," he said.

I was reading this piece about oil drilling and it occurred to me how this issue is fast become the GOP's last gambit to turn back the forces of change, and how Democrats seem to be falling for their trick.

I've argued this issue many times, and I've always tried to make my arguments based on economics, not the environment. Sure, reducing oil consumption will help curb global warming and lessen chances for oil spills and other pollution. And opening up a wildlife refuge in Alaska to oil drilling goes against the entire purpose of having refuges. (Funny how conservatives won't believe scientists who say global warming is a fact, but they will believe scientists who say they know how much recoverable oil lies under the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge without a single test well being drilled. But that's another story.)

So it makes me cringe when I hear Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats saying she is adamant against expanded offshore drilling because she wants to save the planet. It plays right into the GOP attack. For the small number of independent voters who will decide this election, the price of gas means more than possible damage to the environment.

Democrats need to get united to make their counterattack work. It's about the economics, stupid. New drilling will not drop the price of gas, near as much as a little conservation and seeking new energy sources.

In fact, this would be a good time for Dems to cut a deal. They should propose to open up new offshore drilling, but under a little stricter environmental safeguards than before. And, they should throw in a provision that oil companies must begin production on their oil leases in a certain amount of time, or they lose those leases. They already lease 68 million acres that they aren't trying to get oil from now. And it's not like they don't have the money to drill on those 68 million acres, with their record profits rolling in.

The Dems could take this issue off the table by making a bold move like this. But if they continue to make this about the environment, they may just lose this thing.

John McCain has gotten such a free ride from the press all this time, but that looks to be coming to an end amid his myriad stumbles and gaffes. In today's Wall Street Journal, they kill his attack on Obama right in the lead:

Sen. John McCain continues to slam rival Barack Obama for wanting to raise taxes on Social Security, even as he periodically explains that he might be willing to do the same.

Then you have this piece, titled: "Is John McCain Stupid?" What follows is a brutal attack from his right flank.

If McCain has lost the Journal, can the rest of the press -- what he calls his base -- be far behind?